A new, open, community-driven Foodsoft platform

July 14, 2017

As you know, the Foodsoft hosting at app.foodcoops.net
will end this month. But what does that mean?

Benni, who maintained the services over the last years, has no resources for it
anymore. Caused by that the current app.foodcoops.net will be shut down and all
food co-ops using that service need to find a new hosting provider and
transferring their data to them.

We, a small group of people from various food co-ops consisting of Willem from
the Netherlands, Patrick from Austria and André from Germany see the problem
and suggest the following.

For German and Dutch food cooperatives (and others)

We want to develop a sustainable process where the users of the Foodsoft-using
food cooperatives are maintaining and developing the infrastructure and their
software. Basically the online ecosystem needs to be driven by these folks
instead of unknown third parties.

We are interested to work with you to build an open, community-driven and
centrally hosted Foodsoft platform, which will be in place for existing and new
food co-ops. This not only involves the software! It’s also about bringing the
people from the cooperatives together to exchange information, discuss topics
and help each other. The new online platform will help us to do so.

What we need and expect from each group

A permanent contact person plus a fallback person to be able to get in
contact with your food co-op easily (that needs to be part of your co-op task
list).

If you have members in your group that are interested in information
technology, please ask them if they want to contribute to the central
platform to bring in their skills.

A (small) fee to pay the hardware, electricity etc.

Helping to create a forum where the members of various food co-op discuss
topics, answering support questions etc.

The next steps (for food co-ops which do not want to use the Austrian hosting)

The current hardware and infrastructure (at app.foodcoops.net) will be shut
down, therefore we have to migrate your data to our new systems.

Very Important To-Do: You have to send an email to foodsoft[ät]foodcoops.net
(plus CC to transition[ät]foodcoops.nl) that your group wants to transition as
laid out here. Tell your group name which can be identified by your Foodsoft
internet address e.g. https://app.foodcoops.net/schalottchen. The group name
in this example is schalottchen. The email should contain the title
“Transition (your group name) to foodcoops.nl”. If you don’t send an email,
you agree that no data will be handed over to us.

Co-ops, which agreed to the transition, will be migrated and hosted by a
new IT team which is currently forming (Willem, André and more). Please send
us an email to transition[ät]foodcoops.nl if you want to join. The transition
will start end of July beginning of August. (The current Foodsoft will be hosted
until we migrated everyone who contacted us.)

For the Austrian food cooperatives

In Austria an alternative hosting provider is already set under
foodcoops.at. It will be maintained by a working group of the
upcoming “IG FoodCoops” and therefore integrated in the same structure, which
will be used for all other food co-op related issues in Austria. Martin and
Patrick from Austria are already in contact with most of the Austrian
cooperatives since months and cleared up the process for most of them already.

If there was no communication about the Foodsoft transition yet, please contact
them via info[ät]foodcoops.at with the wish for transition. If you want to
continue with your existing data (users, suppliers, articles, …) you need to
write a mail to support[ät]foodcoops.net with the wish for handing over the
existing data to Martin/Patrick from Austria and put info[ät]foodcoops.at into
CC if you haven’t done it yet.

It’s also possible for non-Austrian food co-ops to use the infrastructure, but
it will cost €2/user/year. The money which exceeds the hosting costs will be
used to promote the idea of food cooperatives (e.g. with flyers, discussion
forums) in Austria.

Why is there a different hosting for Austrians and others? Austrian food co-ops
already built an environment, processes and infrastructure which works
basically how we wish to have it on a global level. The Austrian platform is a
national platform, which provides various tools, like Foodsoft (ordering and
more), Discourse (forum in German) and others, and may provide information of
interest specifically for the region or country. So we can learn from the
Austrian groups.